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“It’s the only kind I’ve got extra.”
He took it. He wrapped both hands around the cup and closed his eyes for a second, just feeling the heat.
“Black’s fine,” he said. “Black’s how I take it anyway.”
That was it. That was the whole thing. I went to work. I didn’t think about it.
But the next morning, without deciding to, I ordered two.
And then it was just what I did.
Every weekday for two years, I bought two coffees at the kiosk beside the station. Mine with cream. His black. I’d hand him his cup and we’d talk for five minutes, and then I’d rush off to my office and my spreadsheets and my life.
Larry never begged me for anything. That’s the thing people don’t believe when I tell them. In two years, he never once asked me for money. He never asked me for anything at all. If I brought him something, he took it and thanked me. If I didn’t, he never mentioned it.
But he talked.
God, could that man talk.
Some mornings we discussed the weather like two farmers. Other mornings he complained about the pigeons, which he claimed had a personal grudge against him.
“That gray one,” he said once, pointing. “That one’s been casing me for a week. He’s planning something.”
“He’s a pigeon, Larry.”
“That’s what he wants you to think.”
One morning he looked down at my shoes and shook his head slowly, like a doctor delivering bad news.
“Who designed those?”
“They’re work shoes.”
“They were designed by somebody who hated feet, Sarah. Somebody who woke up one morning full of hate, looked down at his own feet, and thought, I’ll make everyone suffer like I suffer.”
I laughed so hard I nearly spilled my coffee. A man in a suit stared at me like I was crazy, a woman in heels laughing with a homeless man outside the F train.
That was Larry. I never knew his last name for the longest time. I never asked where he’d come from or how he’d ended up on that patch of concrete. It seemed rude, somehow, and he never offered. We just had our five minutes. Mine with cream. His black.
I want to be honest about something. I thought I was a good person for those five minutes.
I really did. I’d walk into my office feeling warm, feeling like I’d done my small kind thing for the day. I bought him socks in the winter. I once spent half my lunch break calling shelters when the temperature dropped below zero, going down a list, getting hung up on, getting put on hold, until I found him a bed for two nights.
I brought him the address written on a napkin.
“You’ll go?” I asked. “Promise me you’ll go.”
“I’ll go.”
“Larry.”
“I’ll go, Sarah. Cross my heart.”
He thanked me for that napkin like I’d handed him the deed to a house.
I felt wonderful.
It never once occurred to me, in two whole years, that Larry might be learning something too. That every time I solved a problem for him, I was teaching him exactly how I worked. What I responded to. How to reach me.
I thought I was studying him.
He was studying me.
The freezing Tuesday came at the end of January.
I remember it was cold enough that the coffee steam looked like smoke, and my breath hung in the air in front of me. I bought the two coffees and walked over to Larry’s spot, and I stopped.
Because Larry looked terrible.
His skin had gone a strange yellowish color, like an old photograph. His lips were pale. His hands, when I gave him his cup, trembled so badly the lid rattled.
And across his knees he held a piece of cardboard. On it, in thick black marker, he’d written:
MARRY ME. I HAVE ONE MONTH LEFT TO LIVE.
I stood there. The traffic noise seemed to fade out, the way it does in movies, except this was real and it was happening to me.
“What is this?” I said, pointing at the sign.
He looked at the cardboard like he’d forgotten it was there.
“The clinic gave me about a month.”
I don’t remember deciding to sit. I just found myself on the cold concrete beside him, my nice work coat pressed against the dirty wall.
“What?” I said. “A month for what?”
“Liver failure.” He said it plainly, the way you’d report the score of a game. “It’s been coming a while. Went to the clinic when I couldn’t keep anything down. They ran their tests. Gave me the number.”
“Larry.” My throat closed up. “Larry, I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t make that face.”
“What face?”
“The one people make when they’re already standing at your funeral.” He took a sip of his black coffee. “You’re doing it right now. Cut it out.”
Even then, dying, he could make me laugh. A wet, terrible laugh, but a laugh.
But the sign wasn’t funny. The sign was still sitting there on his knees.
“Why marriage?” I asked. “Of everything. Why that?”
His eyes dropped to his coffee. For the first time in two years, Larry looked like he didn’t want to talk.
“I don’t want to die belonging to nobody,” he said finally.
“You don’t belong to nobody. You’ve got—” I stopped, because I realized I didn’t actually know who he had. “You’ve got people who care about you.”
“That’s a nice thing to say, Sarah. It’s a different thing on a form.”
He explained it to me then, in that quiet voice. He told me that a man with no legal family, no wife, no children on record, doesn’t get buried by someone who loved him. He gets processed. Some county clerk, some overworked stranger, signs him over to a city plot. No name that means anything. No one to say the words.
“I just want somebody who can walk in and say, ‘He’s mine. I’ll take him.’” He looked at me. “That’s all. That’s the whole thing.”
And here is where I have to tell you the truth about myself, because it matters.
I was single. I’d been single for a long time. I was thirty-eight years old and I lived alone and I was very, very good at solving other people’s problems, mostly because I’d never learned how to sit with my own.
Larry was dying. He’d handed me a problem. A clean, solvable problem, with a form at the end of it.
And I had always been better at solving problems than walking away from them.
“Okay,” I said.
He blinked. “Okay?”
“Okay. Yes. I’ll do it.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Something moved across his face that I didn’t understand at the time. I thought it was relief. Later I’d wonder if it was something closer to guilt.
“You don’t have to decide right now,” he said.
“I just did.”
He nodded slowly. He folded up the cardboard sign and set it aside, and he never held it up again.
“Thank you,” he said. And then, because he was Larry: “Thank you.”
“That’s twice.”
“Thank you,” he said a third time, and grinned, and I punched him lightly in the arm, and that was how I agreed to marry a homeless man outside a subway station on a freezing Tuesday morning.
I told my friend Dana that night. Dana and I had worked together for six years and she was the only person I told anything to.
We were at the wine bar near the office, the one with the sticky tables, and I said it as casually as I could.
“So I’m getting married.”
Dana had her glass halfway to her mouth. She set it back down.
“You’re—what? To who? Sarah, are you seeing somebody? Since when?”
“You know Larry. Coffee Larry. The guy at my station.”
She stared at me.
“The homeless guy.”
“Don’t say it like that.”
“How am I supposed to say it? Sarah.” She lowered her voice, leaned across the table. “You’re marrying the homeless man who lives at your subway stop.”
“He’s dying, Dana. Liver failure. He’s got a month, maybe less. He doesn’t want to be buried as a nobody. If I marry him, I can claim him. I can make sure he gets—” I heard my own voice crack and hated it. “I can make sure somebody buries him with his name.”
Dana was quiet for a second. She reached over and put her hand on mine.
“Honey,” she said. “This is a lot. Even for you.”
“What does that mean, even for me?”
“You know what it means.” She wasn’t being cruel. Dana was never cruel. “You collect people. You always have. The intern nobody would train, you trained him. Your neighbor with the leg, you did her grocery runs for four months. You are the person who fixes things. And I love that about you. But you can’t fix dying, Sarah.”
“I’m not trying to fix dying,” I said. “I’m trying to fix the paperwork.”
She looked at me for a long time.